Rough weather

WEATHER TIDBITS

When we got together last week, I said something about hurricane

season coming up real soon, but forgot to name a date.

The eastern Pacific season officially begins on June 1. The

Atlantic season starts two weeks after that. Funny thing is, theirs

started in April this time around and that’s never happened, at least

since those kind of records were kept.

In the Atlantic, a Category 1 hurricane kicked off the season

about 250 miles east southeast off North Carolina’s outer banks. The

Gulf Stream helped nurture it, but still, for anything to become even

a tropical depression this early and that far north is a real freak

of nature.

Out here in our ocean, the earliest recorded first-named storm was

May 8, 1957, and May 12, 1972, (Ava) and last year’s Adolpho on May

15.

I’ve been keeping track of chubascos, Spanish for tropical storms,

since 1958. I was only 8 then, but we had a summer house on St. Ann’s

that year and I remember the water was really warm and there were

lots of yellow and red flag days.

There was a lot of thunderstorm activity both inland and here in

Laguna -- with a whopper coming during the pre-dawn hours on Aug 15,

1958, three hours of lightning and thunder with over an inch of rain.

The hi-lo that day in Laguna (Aug 15) was 88 and 73 degrees. The

water was 75 degrees and it was red flag. I mean real red flag.

I remember watching second reef Brooks Street pumping all day.

I was just a grom and hadn’t quite yet graduated to surfboard

status.

That was to come on July 20, 1960, at Doheny.

We were only 8, and being so light in weight, we’d stand up on

those canvas rafts we’d get from George’s Raft Stand at Main Beach.

You could knee paddle ‘em too and just take off on an angle on a

big ol’ crusher and wait ‘til it blasted you. I was doing yellow flag

days at 8 years old, but I learned to swim on a flat day at Main

Beach when I was three, so no problem. It was to be discovered later

that in 1958 there was a pretty healthy El Nino going on. We got 24

inches for the 1957-58 rainy season and there was little or no gloom

that summer.

Another additional third of an inch fell last Wednesday, pushing

the May total to an inch plus and the season total to around 17.

Tidbitter got it right for a change, back in September of ’02 he

was calling for 15 to 20 inches for the ‘02-03 season.

Next season? -- 10 inches or less.

See ya!

* DENNIS McTIGHE is a Laguna Beach resident. He earned a

bachelor’s in earth sciences from UC San Diego.